The New York Times has given architect Louise Blanchard Bethune some long-overdue love. Bethune is featured in a November 4 article that is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856-1913) was the first female in the United States to be officially recognized as a professional architect by the American Institute of Architects (1888; Fellow in 1889) and the Western Association of Architects (1885), the two professionally-accepted organizations during late-nineteenth century.
The introduction from The New York Times:
Among the architectural greats who contributed to the landscape of Buffalo, N.Y. — among them Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Hobson Richardson — there was one person who is lesser known but whose impact in shaping the city was just as important: Louise Blanchard Bethune.
Bethune, who is widely considered by historians to have been the first American woman to become a certified architect, designed 18 schools in western New York, as well as factories, hotels, churches, a baseball grandstand and a women’s prison. Another of her firm’s projects, housing the venerable Denton, Cottier & Daniels music store in Buffalo and completed in 1908, was among the first buildings in the country to utilize steel frame construction and poured concrete slabs.
Overall, she and her partners — William R. Fuchs and her husband, Robert Armour Bethune — contributed 180 buildings to Buffalo and New England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bethune supervised the construction of many of these projects, biking to and from the work sites each day.
The 1902 Hotel Lafayette is the most important building still standing designed by Bethune. The faded hotel was redeveloped by developer Rocco Termini a decade ago under plans prepared by Carmina Wood Morris. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. The Hotel Lafayette is a seven-story building designed in the French renaissance style with richly decorated facades on Washington, Clinton and Ellicott Streets made of vitreous red brick and semi-glazed white terra cotta. The principal building was constructed between 1902 and 1911 and designed by the architectural firm of Bethune, Bethune, & Fuchs, with two smaller, sympathetically designed additions by the Buffalo firm of Esenwein & Johnson in 1916-17 and 1924-26.
Bethune died on December 18, 1913 at the age of 57.